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Several Urbana High School students are working frantically to build an athletic anomaly: a 120-pound soccer player that can do a one-armed pull-up while hoisting another player.

Its kick is powered by pneumatic pumps instead of muscles, its body is made of metal, and it thinks in Java programming code.

The player's name is "Fluffy 2.0."

Club members hope to take Fluffy 2.0 to Baltimore next month for this year's FIRST Robotics Chesapeake Regional Competition, where they hope to do better than last year. The Hawks placed 49th out of more than 50 teams in last year's regional competition held in Annapolis.

FIRST — which stands for Foundation for the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology — is a program intended not only to teach youngsters practical engineering and technical expertise, but also to excite and recognize new talent.

Nick Aellen, a 17-year-old senior and the club's president — or "supreme chancellor," as he has been nicknamed — was confident that the team would perform better this year; it couldn't be as bad as last year, when the competitions' server would not recognize Fluffy, ruining the first day of competition.

"It was miserable," said senior Stephen Moore, 17, who heads the team's programmers.

The Aellens' garage was buzzing with activity on Jan. 27 as members of Urbana High's Robotics Club tried to solve a problem with Fluffy 2.0's pneumatic pumps, which were either delivering too little or too much power to perform the task of kicking a soccer ball with precision.

In addition to the basic kit provided by FIRST, club members have "years worth of spare parts" lying around the Aellen's garage in Mount Airy, where the club meets to work on Fluffy 2.0., the latest iteration of the team's robot.

The club has been working on the robot for the better part of three weeks, and is halfway through the six-week period it has to build and program the robot. They have to ship it on Feb. 23 so it can be inspected and entered in the competition, which runs March 11-13. A team from Linganore High School will also compete.

The Urbana team had an easier time writing the programs for Fluffy this year, in part because of experience they gained last year, Stephen said.

Stephen Moore — who lost the argument to name the robot "Fluffy 2010" — was one of the programmers last year, and only finished work on the contraption the night before the completion, losing much sleep in the process.

This year the programming was much smoother, partially because he didn't have to teach himself the C++ programming language, as he did last year.

The team is sponsored in part by BAE Systems, which was represented on Jan. 27 by Bill Heitzler, an engineer with the company who mentors the team, answering general engineering questions as they come up. Heitzler doesn't oversee work, acting instead as an advisor. "I'm here for support," Heitzler said.

BAE Systems contributed $3,500 directly to FIRST to help pay for the $5,000 entry fee, Nick Aellen said. Other sponsors included Glen Research, DRS Technologies, Key Financial Group, New Solutions Realty and Machadocom.

First-year members were attracted to the club because it offered them an opportunity to creatively apply their interest in technology and computer programming. Alex Cloewczynski, a 17-year-old Urbana senior, is a member of the club's electrical team, though she has helped out with the mechanical team that builds the robot as well.

"It's very hard to pick one spot on this team," she said.

John Pizzo, a 14-year-old freshman, joined because he was interested in learning how to program the robot. He said that he learned the Java programming language in his first two days working with the team.

"He's done very well," Stephen Moore said. "He's picked it up very quickly."

E-mail Christian Brown at chbrown@gazette.net.